June 26 update: I've had some issues with site speed after implementing Buddypress. Hold on while I figure out the best approach here. Things may be in flux a while. Most of the interesting things happening on the web seem to involve a strong community element. Think about Wikipedia, Wordpress, Twitter, Youtube, Quora -- all of these sites thrive on community content and interaction. So this weekend I decided to update a few features on I...
It's always fun / makes my stomach turn to wake up to a newsletter that starts out saying, "Tom Johnson's post Structured Authoring Versus the Web triggered a wave of responses across the tech comm community." I've been thinking about that post and discussion (1, 2 , 3). A lot of people have made excellent arguments in response and called me out on being short-sighted. One person noted that I should nuance my opinions with more notes and ...
I recently received the following question from a reader: I just found out that our next-gen cloud-based Help needs to filter content — when our user logs in, she must see only info for the products her company bought AND the role she holds. In your exploration of dynamic help, have you found any out-of-the-box solutions that include single-sign-on? Author-it Aspect seems close; maybe MindTouch, too. Zendesk filters, but can't do complex...
One of the pains in tech comm is figuring out a good collaborative authoring to publishing workflow. When you're authoring content, you're usually in the figure-it-out mode. You add pieces here and there as you learn how a system works. You gather feedback from subject matter experts, who also add comments, delete or add content, and so forth as they review the content. Sometimes the content originates from the subject matter expert and y...
In my previous post, I wrote about faceted search and faceted classification, and how facets can help users narrow information to a specific topic. Even if you've never heard the term "faceted search," you've no doubt used it on various websites, like Google, Amazon, Linkedin, and more. When you perform a search, you get a list of filters to further narrow the information. Each of the filters (or facets) narrows the results. Here's facete...
One interesting study Mark Baker pointed me to is Incompetent Research Skills Curb Users' Problem Solving on the Nielsen Normal site. Nielsen found that searchers are becoming so trusting with search results that they assume if they don't find the answer immediately with the same type of search query, the answer isn't available. They don't try different search strategies to try to surface different results. Nielsen writes, Still, the roug...
At the recent Drupalcon conference, Karen McGrane gave an awesome keynote titled Thriving in a World of Change: Future-friendly content with Drupal. (Although I didn't attend the conference, the talk and her slides are online.) In her presentation, Karen emphasized the need to transform content management systems away from the "content goes here" type of blob to a CMS that separates content from format, one that allows users to embed met...
I'm working on some slides for an upcoming presentation and wanted to post them here because they encapsulate a lot of my thoughts about organizing help content and findability. Let me know if you have feedback. I tried to create the slides as a storybook.
One challenge I've recently been considering is how to handle content re-use on a web content management system, such as Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, or some other web platform. Let's say you're writing about ACME widgets and have three different audiences: ACME developers, ACME sales people, and ACME administrators. All your help content is hosted on the same web platform. In this scenario, you have a lot of different information, much of ...
5/22 update: This post generated a lot of controversy, and I believe part of the controversy could have been avoided if I had articulated my ideas better. I've gone through and updated parts of this post by adding notes. My additions appear in green. The previous title was "Structured Authoring Versus the Web". However, of course the web uses structured authoring. Every web form in this post -- the title, body, category, tag, date, featur...
In my previous post, Do Short Topics Make Information More Findable, I argued that shorter topics make it more difficult for users to find information. I ended the post by saying that topics that are more substantial make content more findable. But how big should the topics be? Obviously not the length of a book, because that switches us right back into the book paradigm. There's probably not an exact way to determine topic length, becaus...
In my last post, which now has more than 80 comments, I noted that authoring with DITA seemed to encourage authors to create a lot of little topics. DITA experts chimed in to say DITA doesn't constrain users with topic length in their outputs -- authors can combine topics as needed. However, one commenter noted that short topics are a best practice anyway: Most users I have written for have no desire to read or skim through a long page of...
In many companies, documentation and support are different kingdoms, with their own tools, processes, and workflow. As such, the content usually remains separate. When users need information, they have to search different content repositories (that is, if support even even makes its content accessible to users at all). It seems natural that combining the search scope to include both support content and documentation would create a winning...
I owe a lot to James Naismith, the man who invented basketball. In case you're unfamiliar with the origin of basketball, basketball is actually an evolution of running. Naismith was an exercise coach who tried making exercise more fun by placing peach baskets at both ends of a gym. Previously, people would run around or do other exercises with no explicit purpose. Now they would try to put a soccer ball in a peach basket. In other words, ...
For an updated post on this topic, see DITA's output does not require you to separate tasks from concepts. I'm currently exploring the possibility of authoring content in DITA (using a tool such as easyDITA), publishing to an HTML web help output (through the DITA Open Toolkit), and then importing the output into Drupal (through some Python scripts someone has created). This sounds like a good workflow to me, but I've kind of run into a l...
